Becoming Nature: Animals, Places + People in Literature

School of English Evening Lecture Series

‘Introduction to Series + Beckett’s Birds’

Dr Julie Bates

Becoming Nature: Animals, Places + People in Literature

Trinity School of English, Evening Lecture Series

21 January: ‘Beckett’s Birds’ and introduction to lecture series (Julie Bates)

28 January: ‘Rewilding the Child: Nature, Wilderness, and Children's Literature’ (Jane Carroll)

04 February: ‘“The Worms Are Coming Up the Stairs!”: Eco-Horror in 1970s American Cinema’

(Bernice Murphy)

11 February: ‘Climate and the Emergency: the wartime flood narrative in T.H. White’s The

Elephant and the Kangaroo’ (Eve Patten)

18 February: ‘Creatures great and small in Edward Topsell’s Histories of Serpents and Four-Footed

Beasts’ (Ema Vyroubalová)

25 February: ‘Nature, Knowledge, and the Fall in Donne's Anniversaries’ (Mark Sweetnam)

10 March: ‘The Sublime: Edmund Burke, Cork, and God’ (Jarlath Killeen)

24 March: ‘John McGahern and the alternative life of the farm’ (Nicholas Grene)

31 March: ‘Environmental Picturebooks for Children' (Sinéad Moriarty)

07 April: ‘Canyons and Native-American Traces in Zane Gray’s Riders on the Purple Sage’ (Dara

Downey)

For dates and more information please visit: ww.tcd.ie/owc or email: wilde@tcd.ie

Photo Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

Introduction to

Lecture Series

The danger of this writing style is that there will be an awful lot of ‘I’. If there is a lot

of ‘I’ … then it won’t be the wild places we behold, but the author. We see him

swimming, climbing, looking, feeling, hearing, responding, being sensitive, and because

almost no one else speaks, this begins to feel like an appropriation, as if the land has

been taken from us and offered back, in a different language and tone and attitude.

Because it’s land we’re talking about, this leads to an unfortunate sense that we’re in

the company, however engaging, of another ‘owner’, or if not an owner, certainly a

single mediator.

‘My sleepings-out, in cups and dips of rock and earth and snow; this was the habit

of the hare. But the pull to the high ground, to the summits and ridges, to look

down upon the land, this was in mimicry of the hawk.’

The author is everywhere, north, south, east and west. High and low. He is both hawk

and hare.

Kathleen Jamie, ‘A Lone Enraptured Male’, London Review of Books,

Vol. 30 No. 5, 6 March 2008

The climate emergency and the political crisis in which we are now trying to find our

way, and which we are anxious to oppose by saving the world have not come out of

nowhere. We often forget that they are not just the result of a twist of fate or

destiny, but of some very specific moves and decisions―economic, social, and to do

with world outlook (including religious ones). Greed, failure to respect nature,

selfishness, lack of imagination, endless rivalry and lack of responsibility have

reduced the world to the status of an object that can be cut into pieces, used up and

destroyed. That is why I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living,

single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at

the same time powerful part of it.

Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize Lecture (2018 laureate)

READING LIST

Rosi Braidotti interview, CCCLAB (2019): https://youtu.be/A6PLJqtDp6Q

Rachel Carson study by Jill Lepore, New Yorker (2018) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/the-right-way-to-remember-rachel-carson

Environmental Humanities journal: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities. Editorial from the first issue of the journal: ‘Thinking through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities’ (2012): http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol1/EH1.1.pdf

Donna Haraway interview, LA Review of Books (2019): https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/making-kin-an-interview-with-donna-haraway/

Kathleen Jamie interview, Guardian (2019): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/17/kathleen-jamie-surfacing-interview-nature-writing-colonised-by-white-men

Kathleen Jamie, short film featuring her reading from her essay ‘The Hvalsalen’ in her 2012 book Sightlines: https://youtu.be/igRFy8fdDks

Kathleen Jamie and Brigid Collins, ‘Frissure’, Granta (2012): https://granta.com/frissure/

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854): https://www.walden.org/work/walden/

Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Lecture (2019): https://youtu.be/VvZAXL28K2E

Thom Van Dooren, ‘Science can’t do it alone: the environment needs humanities too’, The Conversation (2012): http://theconversation.com/science-cant-do-it-alone-the-environment-needs-humanities-too-9286

Thom Van Dooren, ‘Making Worlds with Crows’ ongoing project: https://thomvandooren.org/encountering-crows-project/

UCD podcast series on ‘Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities’: http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/series11.html

Beckett’s Birds

Visited by partridges now daily, about midday. Queer birds.

They hop, listen, hop, listen, never seem to eat.

Beckett, letter to Pamela Mitchell, March 1955

It is against Ussy’s funerary silence and sobriety that the sight and

sound of birds – always so dear to Beckett – stand out, if at times they

also do so paradoxically, as when he writes: ‘Everything sopping wet

under a black sky. Only bright spot a blackbird.’ In the ‘Fizzle’ he

writers four years later, ‘Au loin un oiseau’ (‘Afar a Bird’), a bird

makes a welcome appearance, reminder as it is of a world beyond the

seeking-sought self – birds are forever other and elsewhere than the

human. It is with something approaching schoolmasterly thoroughness

that he sends the roll-call, to his cousin the musician John Beckett:

‘Back yesterday from Ussy. Larks & cuckoos satisfactory. Swallows few.

Nightingales in the copse behind the house.’

Dan Gunn, Introduction, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume Four: 1966–1989, eds. Gunn,

Craig, Fehsenfeld, Overbeck (Cambridge University Press, 2017), lxxviii

Molloy (Minuit, 1951;

Grove, 1955)

Malone meurt (Minuit, 1951;

Grove, 1956)

L’Innommable (Minuit, 1953;

Grove, 1958)

Rough for Theatre II,

1958-60

From an Abandoned Work,

1957

Happy Days, 1960-61

My birds had not been killed. They were wild birds

. . . I tried to understand their language better.

Without having recourse to mine. They were the

longest, loveliest days of all the year. I lived in the

garden. I have spoken of a voice telling me things,

I was getting to know it better now, to understand

what it wanted.

Sapo loved nature, took an interest in animals and

plants and willingly raised his eyes to the sky, day

and night. But he did not know how to look at all

these things, the looks he rained upon them taught

him nothing about them. He confused the birds with

one another, and the trees, and could not tell one

crop from another crop.

But he loved the flight of the hawk and could

distinguish it from all others. He would stand

rapt, gazing at the long pernings, the

quivering poise, the wings lifted for the

plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated

by such extremes of need, of pride, of

patience and solitude.

Birds with my piercing sight I have seen flying so high, so

far, that they seemed at rest, then the next minute they

were all about me, crows have done this. Ducks are

perhaps the worst, to be suddenly stamping and

stumbling in the midst of ducks, or hens, any class of

poultry, few things are worse.

Jim Norton and Timothy Spall in Rough for Theatre II, dir. Katie Mitchell, Beckett on Film (2002)

Rosaleen Linehan in Happy Days, dir. Patricia Rozema, Beckett on Film (2002)